212. double punishment
Our collective narrative — the stories passed down through generations to help the next succeed — has become lost amid a rapidly advancing world. No longer can we agree on a path forward, as a result, our health suffers. All this stems from a profiteering medical system that seeks to “better” humanity by further disconnecting us from our natural past, and what gave us the strength and vitality to thrive up to this point, instead creating greater discord within our body.
We’ve been misled in thinking that there is no knowledge to be drawn from our past that can improve our health, when everything in life, and especially science, has been built upon the foundation that came before it. What works sticks, what doesn’t sloughs off. Now we are led to believe that the best way to capture health is NOT to look back to what gave us strength and vitality in the past, but to look forward to what science can manifest. That medicine has the power to save us from ourselves, if only we take this or cut that out. All the while we casually walk down the path of double punishment, losing who we are, along with the health we are trying to reclaim.
121. expectations of health
For two million years man was a success. His journey through time efficiently living as a hunter-gatherer might have seen him through another million-year anniversary. Yet, for us, the chances of our way of life seeing us through another passing century is diminished with each day’s activities.
During our transition to modernity from the hunter-gatherer life, those few thousand years have revealed to us that we can master our environment, but not without consequence. Our efforts to create a world based on desire has wreaked havoc upon the natural order of the world and managed to bring into disrepute the highly evolved good sense that guided our behavior throughout the entirety of our coevolution with this planet. Led by the subjective and uncomprehending gaze of scientific thought, our instinctual competence has seen an increasingly diminutive role over time. Our innate sense of what is best for us has been superseded by the scientific theory, letting intellect serve as the foundation to decipher what should be done — surgery, medication, suppression of symptoms — without taking our real needs into consideration — proper nutrition, lifestyle, aligning ourselves with nature.
We were not formed by the intellectual thought processes theorized and borne out of a lab setting, that sought to guide us toward a better tomorrow. Our successful march forward was only achievable through the adaptation of our environment, led by the expectations of the past. In a sense, we came out of the world, thus are adapted to thrive within it if given the permission to listen to our instinctual needs, instead of the loudest opinions on what should be done to capture health. Therefore, aligning ourselves in accordance to what the body expects by looking to the past to design programs and initiatives, versus the tragic narrative composed by the popular opinion of the day, will best serve us in our efforts to recapture our health.
In the Continuum Concept, author Jean Liedloff speaks to this very fact, in that “Expectation… is founded as deeply in man as his very design. His lungs not only have, but can be said to be, an expectation of air; his eyes are an expectation of light rays of the specific range of wavelengths sent out by what is useful for him to see at the hours appropriate for his species to see them; his ears are an expectation of vibrations caused by the events most likely to concern him, including the voices of other people; and his own voice is an expectation of ears functioning similarly in them.” She goes on to say that his list can be indefinitely extended; “waterproof skin and hair — expectation of rain; pigmentation in skin — expectation of sun; perspiratory mechanism — expectation of heat; coagulator mechanism — expectation of accidents to body surfaces; reflex mechanism — expectation of the need for speed of reaction in emergencies.”
It is this sense of expectation that led our body to its robustness and resiliency over millennia. The slow transition granted us the time to easily adapt to the environment we found ourselves within, living in good health and harmony with the natural environment. The sudden shift over the past few thousand years created significant changes to our environment as we pushed toward modernity. With it, we saw lifespan’s expand and at the same time healthspan’s reduce. Instead of understanding the reason behind our declines in health were due to a mismatch in our environment — one divorced from nature and all its wisdom — we used our intellect, guided by scientific thought to suppress our instinctual urges, further separating us from the health that was so easily found by those of past generations who’s success was afforded by succumbing to the natural way of doing things.
How is it that we got things so wrong? How is it that the forces of nature that put us together in good health to begin with knew what we would need? As with mastery of anything it comes down to experience. The lineage of experiences encountered from the first single-cell eukaryote to the multi-trillion cellular structure we recognize as human is vast enough to defy comprehension, and at the same time obvious in the sense that the only way to become proficient at anything is through repetition. In the millions of years preceding this pivotal point in our history, what you and I have become is the culmination of experiences ranging from environmental changes resulting in everything from temperature fluctuations to the availability of nourishment. All of which gave our body the data to inherently know what it needs to thrive, transmitted by means still unknown to science.
The intellect of scientific thought has largely suppressed the instinctual urges of what we inherently know is right. The epidemic rates of poor health, disease, and obesity have been brought upon us by differing consistently to the idea that what we read is better than what our body is telling us. Our continued reliance on a system that has constantly failed us is nothing less than insanity.
108. modern disadvantage
Imagine living 10,000 years ago. As the sun draws down over the plains you find yourself huddled around the campfire with your tribe, where the kill from that day’s hunt is roasting on a spit. Waiting to eat the whole animal, organs and all, you gnaw on a collection of berries, roots, and leafy vegetation gathered from pristine mineral-rich soils. Your water came from a nearby stream that is fed by the snow melt from a distant mountain top. You’re outside, with sun kissed skin, in the fresh air, sitting on the ground barefoot, fresh soil under your fingernails from the day’s gathering. The day is over, and there is nothing left to do but enjoy the company of your tribe, the stars, and the sustenance of that days kill. And as darkness takes over, your body will know it’s time to rest, just as it knows to rise with the following day’s sun because that’s natures rhythm.
Fast-forward to your present life. You’re woken up at an ungodly time of the morning by the blaring of an alarm clock that hates your dreams, so that you can be up early enough to beat traffic to a job you probably only work so that you can afford the place you live and buy toys you don’t need. If you’re lucky, you have time to spare to cook a breakfast where you cut up pesticide-aided GMO vegetables, thrown into a few factory-farmed eggs — don’t forget to remove the yolks, we have to think about our cholesterol number! — that are frying in butter made from cows fed a nutrient-poor and ruminantly-incorrect diet of corn. Once the food is done, you eat, clean up with your antibacterial soap, and rush out of the front door. You go from your climate-controlled home, to your climate-controlled car, to your climate-controlled office, where you sit hunched over a desk, staring at a screen all day. You make sure to check your phone regularly to break up the monotony of your 8-hour slog with a continual stream of fresh notifications that satisfy you like a slow morphine drip. The day ends, you’re stuck in traffic breathing in the fumes from the traffic, feeling the stress from the workday and the political talk on the radio, your eyes hurt from all the screen time, and you have no energy to make a decent meal when you arrive home so you order a pizza, eat and fall into a restless sleep to do it all over again tomorrow.
The difference between these two scenarios couldn’t be more stark. We have to deal with with exponentially more chronic stress than our ancestors did, which wears heavily on us, both mentally and physically. Our ancestors weren’t stressed about bills, viruses, work emails, or taxes. They didn’t have Hot Pocket’s or DoorDash to deliver them food that stressed their digestive systems so much that they would need toxic pharmaceutical drugs to counteract the affects of a high stress, nutrient poor diet. The environment we built for ourselves is robbing us of nutrients, and microbial defenses that used to come as part of our diets by default. The way we live now is deficient and sterile. We were tricked into swapping out fat for sugar as it was meant to improve our health, yet the “food” we’re eating is so processed that not even insects will eat it.
As Aubrey Marcus put in in Own the Day, Own Your Life:
“All that artificially and hyper sterility have robbed our bodies of the natural conditioning and the necessary bacteria that come from being outdoors and eating food that grew in the earth or ran, swam, or flew on it. Instead, we become prey to the bacteria — ever sicker, ever more vulnerable. Add to that, the problems of soil that’s been overfarmed, and animals that re undernourished, and you’ve got a recipe for a food supply and an environment that leaves our bodies wanting more.”
We’ve built a society that was meant to be greater than where we came from, but in reality we’re at more of a disadvantage when it comes to our health than ever.
76. salutogenesis
What are the origins of health? Aaron Antonovsky sought to answer that question in his 1979 book entitled Health, Stress and Coping. In it, he introduced the term salutogenesis, which places emphasis on the elements that promote health, rather than the factors that strip it away and cause disease (a.k.a. pathogenesis). It’s a radical departure from the “pill for every ill” ideology we’ve all become accustomed to in the traditional healthcare model. Much like myself, Antonovsky rejected the theories of the “traditional medical-model dichotomy separating health and illness” and instead figured that one can only exist in the absence of another.
Today, more than ever, the majority of people seem to only be worried about not getting sick, rather than taking actions to optimize health. Unfortunately, if you continue to think this way, it’s important to understand the fundamental truth that you’re never going to be able to get healthy by doing the same things that made you susceptible to poor health to begin with. Perhaps, it’s the hypnotic narrative of fear perpetuated by daily body counts on the “News” that keeps you holding on to the current medical model. Yet, it is not your savior and it was never designed to make you well to being with. It’s time to start to think differently. The origins of health aren’t rooted in medications or vaccinations, they come from making the right decisions that work for you and your biology.
To illustrate the fundamental difference between the current pathogenetic medical model and the idea of salutogenetic model, let me ask you this. Say, your friend entrusts you to take care of their plant while away on vacation. While they’re gone, you see the leaves starting to turn brown. What do you do? You can paint those leaves green, or you can give the plant what it needs? (Here’s a hint, it’s not electrolytes!) I’m assuming, that since it’s not 2505, your first thought is to give the plant water. The browning of the leaves is a symptom of something not right with the plants biology. Painting the leaves green is akin to taking medication to “solve” the problem, yet only serves to mask the symptom.
Taking the analogy further, think of yourself as the plant. Are you giving yourself the proper things you need to thrive? Do you know what they are? Or do you wait until things start to breakdown, and then search for medications to suppress they symptoms of your faulty lifestyle? This isn’t meant to be harsh so much as eye-opening. Remember, I can’t make you change unless you want to.
You came into this world with only one responsibility, and that was to take care of yourself. Somewhere along the line, most of us surrender our power to a system that seeks profit over health, that manipulates our understanding of what health is, how it’s achieved, and maintained. Staying within this mindset keeps us looking in the wrong direction. We are continuously looking forward in time for the latest medication or vaccination to save us. It’s a faulty and dangerous premise. Instead, we need to look backward to the past, to see what made us strong enough to prevail thousands of years to get to this point where our health is crumbling. I’m a firm believer in the salutogentic model of health as it seeks to define the origins of health. Those origins fall directly in line with the ancestral approach I have successfully applied with my clients in the past, and will continue to use it with anyone who wishes to break free from the tragic paradigm that is the modern “healthcare” system. It’s time to change the way we think. Sometimes a step backwards can be a step in the right direction.
modern day mismatch
We seem to be searching for answers to what ails us in the form of pharmaceutical drugs, fad diets, elective surgery, workout programs, etc., even when this trend seems to make matters worse. The majority of interventions basically follow the same strategy, “fix” the symptom, instead of finding the cause. This mentality has been ingrained into our mentality for a century so it isn’t hard to see why this is the status quo. However, it’s easy to see by the substantial decline in health over the last half-century, that the path we are on isn’t the best way to capture health. I think we are looking in the wrong direction for answers — we are looking forward for the next big breakthrough to save us from ourselves, when we should be looking to our past when we were more resilient.
You may be surprised to hear this, but your lack of sleep doesn’t stem from a Lunesta deficiency. In fact, it doesn’t come from any pharmaceutical drug deficiency at all! most likely, it came fro your inability to adjust your lifestyle so that sleep became a priority instead of an afterthought. Poor sleep can manifest through multiple variables — too much stress, food intolerances, circadian rhythm dysfunction, too much blue light, not enough sunlight, eating too late, not moving your body enough, underlying chemical toxicity, and even depression. Basically, your everyday life is creating a mismatch with how you’re meant to be living.
In the past, we came out of the environment. We adapted to the way things were in the natural world and thrived because there was no alternative. We carry those same adaptations (genetics) into the present, where we share 99% of the same DNA as our ancestors, who lived 10,000 years ago. And while, we share so much of ourselves, we’ve lost so much of that natural environment. We’ve built our modern environment to satisfy our desires, at the detriment of our need for the natural world.
Now, we eat constantly, yet we’re never full. We crave input, yet we’re never satisfied. We’re all connected, yet we all share a deep sense of loneliness. We seek dopamine hit after dopamine hit, until no amount of stimulation can bring us out of the dull trance that is indicative of the modern day mismatch.
We ran so fast, so hard, for so long in our pursuit to create a “safe” society where we could acquire new and shiny things to make us comfortable, that we forgot what really makes us human. It certainly isn’t a new iPhone, Smart TV, Uber, DoorDash, Keto Donuts, Veganism, 24 hour news, or any other of the crazy bullshit that is being sold. We are trapped in a cycle that is literally killing us with convenience.
It is no coincidence that stress, sleep deficits, sedentarism, processed foods, exposure to chemicals, lack of social support, pharmaceutical drugs, and lack of contact with nature is having a profound impact on our overall health and wellness. How could it not? The majority of the shit we do is just to be able to afford the shit we don’t need. On top of that, all these factors have an ability to determine whether our genetic blueprints express health or disease. That’s right, the environment we have created is literally killing us.
Sometimes a step backwards is a step in the right direction.
If anyone is familiar with Joseph Campbell, you’ll have heard of the Hero’s Journey. If not, it’s the classic mythological story about how a Hero sets out on a journey of adventure, along the way he comes up against hardship, overcomes, learns about himself and the world, and then returns home with a new outlook. We are the Hero in our adventure story. To create better health, we need to understand that the path we are on is not beneficial to our health and longevity. We have to learn from the hardships that manifest as exponential rate of poor health, so that we can overcome this adversity. We need to take what we’ve learned and return home with a more natural approach to life. There can be harmony between technology and a more natural way of living. Including real food, abundant movement, establishing a loving community, restful sleep, and a grateful mindset are all something we should strive for in our Hero’s journey.